Elsevier

Journal of Pragmatics

Volume 196, July 2022, Pages 1-5
Journal of Pragmatics

Editorial
Pragmatic marker combinations: Introduction

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2022.04.005Get rights and content

Highlights

  • This essay introduces the articles included in the Journal of Pragmatics Special Issue on ‘Pragmatic marker combinations’.

  • Prior research is introduced with a focus on the dimensions PM co-occurrence and PM ordering.

  • The article summarizes current questions in research on PM combinations and points to avenues for future research.

Abstract

This article introduces the Special Issue on pragmatic marker (PM) combinations. While research on pragmatic markers, or discourse markers, is a well-established area in pragmatics, investigating their combinatory behavior is a relatively recent trend. The article argues that research on PM combinations involves two main perspectives, namely the question of PM co-occurrence and the question of PM ordering. Addressing the first question means to analyze which PMs co-occur and which do not and to explore the motivations for co-occurrence. The second question investigates the regularities in ordering PMs that occur in combination and explores possible explanations for these regularities. The papers collected in this special issue address both of these questions in a diverse selection of languages and in the left and right utterance periphery. This introductory essay discusses the individual articles, summarizes the main findings of the Special Issue as a whole, and points to avenues for future research.

Section snippets

Perspectives on pragmatic marker combinations

The past decade has seen a steady rise in interest on the part of pragmatics researchers in the combinatory behavior of discourse markers, or, more broadly, pragmatic markers (PMs). While definitions vary, the term pragmatic marker typically denotes a syntactically optional element that does not change the truth conditions of its host construction and tends to occur in its periphery (see e.g., Brinton, 1996 on the characteristics of PMs).1

Contributions to this special issue

The contribution by Crible and Degand (2021) addresses both the co-occurrence question and the ordering question in a corpus-analysis of spoken French. Crible and Degand extract 1502 PMs instantiating 92 types from the corpus. Of this sample they find that 420 instances are PM occurrences that are part of a PM combination. Crible and Degand argue that different degrees of integration of PM sequences need to be distinguished, ranging from “accidental co-occurrence to fixed idioms” (p. 20). In

Conclusions and outlook

Taken together, the papers in this Special Issue extend research on PM combinations in important ways and along different dimensions. The articles clearly corroborate the general finding of strong constraints in PM ordering, as demonstrated again by Crible and Degand. Extending this line of research is the article by Koops and Lohmann, who show that instances of reversible PM sequences may be explained by the functions performed by alternative orders. This finding highlights the importance of

The articles in this special issue

Crible, Ludivine & Liesbeth Degand. 2021. Co-occurrence and ordering of discourse markers in sequences: A multifactorial study in spoken French. Journal of Pragmatics 177. 18–28. doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2021.02.006.

Izutsu, Mitsuko N. & Katsunobu Izutsu. 2021. Very simple, though, isn't it? Pragmatic marker sequencing at the right periphery. Journal of Pragmatics 182. 118–132. doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2021.04.007.

Koops, Christian & Arne Lohmann. 2022. Explaining reversible discourse marker

Arne Lohmann is Professor of English Linguistics in the Department of British Studies at the University of Leipzig. He completed his PhD studies at the University of Hamburg in 2011 and received his Habilitation from the Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf in 2019. He has published on a wide variety of topics, including grammatical variation, word-formation, the phonetics and phonology of grammatical categories, and discourse markers. In his research, he places particular emphasis on

References (22)

  • Ben Hutchinson

    Automatic classification of discourse markers on the basis of their co-occurrences

  • Arne Lohmann is Professor of English Linguistics in the Department of British Studies at the University of Leipzig. He completed his PhD studies at the University of Hamburg in 2011 and received his Habilitation from the Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf in 2019. He has published on a wide variety of topics, including grammatical variation, word-formation, the phonetics and phonology of grammatical categories, and discourse markers. In his research, he places particular emphasis on rigorous, quantitative investigations.

    Christian Koops is Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of New Mexico. He received his PhD in Linguistics from Rice University in 2011. His work in pragmatics applies quantitative (corpus-linguistic, statistical) methods to qualitative (e.g. discourse functional and conversation analytic) questions. In this area, he has published on information structure constructions and discourse markers. Another focus of his research is variationist sociophonetics, specifically the role of phonetic detail in language and dialect contact, with a focus on North American English and varieties of Spanish in the Americas.

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